FACE-TO-FACE
Doosan
South Africa has the potential, I ' ve always said, to be the breadbasket of Africa, and infrastructure development in the construction industry is a brilliant starting point.
Doosan’ s heavy-duty DX225LCA hydraulic excavator has been designed to cope efficiently and safely in Africa’ s harsh operating conditions.
economy. While they may have the contracts, they are maybe not cash-flush or asset-strong enough to warrant finance, and the banks all want a 20 % deposit. Understandably, really. If a company buys a R2-million piece of kit and then wants to give it back after a few months because the contract has gone sour, the bank needs to make sure that there ' s enough equity invested in it that the company doesn’ t want to lose it and will do everything in its power to keep it going. So what we sometimes do, on a very limited basis, is rent-to-buy deals, for example, which are really intended for the customer to build up a deposit so they can secure finance from the bank.
RG: Another area receiving a lot of focus at the moment is telematics and data analysis. Do you use any of that sort of technology?
RW: Yes, we do. I believe that telematics is the future. We use Doosan-specific, factoryfitted telematics on our larger machines, as well as third-party solutions on some of our other machines. From the distributor’ s point of view, you are able to monitor the machine for maintenance purposes, and the customer can also manage their fleet and optimise their operations from a central point. But you ' ve got to have a champion who is dedicated to managing the data and sending out the alerts if a machine is starting to overheat, or if fuel
consumption is increasing or productivity is dropping, and so on.
So it is the future, but remember we ' re in Africa, so on your upper-echelon and high production sites or mines it works like a dream. If you ' ve got R200-million or R1-billion ' s worth of equipment out there, you ' re going to want to know what is going on. But the further you move away from that and into the more remote areas with smaller contractors, the less important telematics becomes.
RG: With this increasing level of technology, cybersecurity is also becoming much more important, which we’ ve seen from the two big cyberattacks in recent months. What is your opinion on this area?
RW: Cyberattacks are a very real problem worldwide, and I think that modern-day terrorism is heading that way. You can shut the whole world down, really, and it ' s very worrying, so we have to be aware of it and take whatever software precautions we can. For us this is part of the general package that comes with the telematics solution. Obviously, every software program has built-in barriers and firewalls and so on, but unfortunately in some of these cases, the point seems to be to create chaos, rather than achieve any particular goal— they do it just because they can. And this is an area that could affect all aspects of your life, not just equipment. Just take your motor car today, it ' s full of electronics and if somebody knows what they are doing, they can manipulate your car.
RG: What do you think are going to be the big areas or the big trends to watch, specifically in South Africa, over the next few years in the industries that use this kind of equipment?
RW: Well I think one is definitely the political scene— it’ s going to make or break these industries, and following on from that would be socio-economic conditions. If you get a government that is pro-job creation, the mining and construction industries would both grow. Another important area is education; our education standards are dismal, to the point where it is even affecting our universities. And this also comes back to socioeconomic factors, because where wealthier people can elect to go the private education route, including private universities, that option is extremely expensive, which then widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots. So that ' s a big worry; we must keep our education standards up, and again, so much relates to good governance, from both a government and a corporate level. This country has so much potential, if we can just get past the corruption. n
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SEPTEMBER 2017